Open Access Heatmap 2016

Just as 2015 and 2014 I produced an Open Access Heatmap using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here, it was retrieved from the DOAJ yesterday). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced the following heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per country. Please note that the map is generated by CartoDB and that CartoDB’s terms of use and terms of service apply. Click on a country to see how many Open Access Journals are published there. The countries publishing most of the Open Access Journals listed in the DOAJ are: Brazil (873), the United Kingdom (754) and the United States of America (675). Please feel free to use the CSV file and mash it up with other data just as Christian Heise did with the data from 2015.

Please note that the map has only illustrative value and of course it is obvious that it needs to be contextualized with other information to allow profound conclusions. Anyone who wants to have more detailled or granualar information is invited to take the data available on the web and to build heatmaps that visualize for instance the number of Open Access articles published per country. Of course it may also be useful to take other indicators into account as consumer price index, expenditures for research or the number of scientists.

Although I am very well aware of all these limitations of the heatmap published here unfortunatley I do not have the time to collect the data and build these maps – it is up to the rest of the Open Access community to do so if it thinks better maps are needed.